Cite as: 506 U. S. 56 (1992)
Opinion of the Court
noncriminal context. Indeed, it acknowledged what is evident from our precedents—that the Amendment's protection applies in the civil context as well. See O'Connor v. Ortega, 480 U. S. 709 (1987); New Jersey v. T. L. O., 469 U. S. 325, 334-335 (1985); Michigan v. Tyler, 436 U. S. 499, 504-506 (1978); Marshall v. Barlow's, Inc., 436 U. S. 307, 312-313 (1978); Camara v. Municipal Court of San Francisco, 387 U. S. 523, 528 (1967).11
Nor did the Court of Appeals suggest that the Fourth Amendment applied exclusively to law enforcement activities. It observed, for example, that the Amendment's protection would be triggered "by a search or other entry into the home incident to an eviction or repossession," 942 F. 2d, at 1077.12 Instead, the court sought to explain why the Fourth Amendment protects against seizures of property in the plain-view context, but not in this case, as follows:
"[S]eizures made in the course of investigations by police or other law enforcement officers are almost always, as in the plain view cases, the culmination of searches. The police search in order to seize, and it is the search
11 It is true that Murray's Lessee v. Hoboken Land & Improvement Co., 18 How. 272 (1856), cast some doubt on the applicability of the Amendment to noncriminal encounters such as this. Id., at 285. But cases since that time have shed a different light, making clear that Fourth Amendment guarantees are triggered by governmental searches and seizures "without regard to the use to which [houses, papers, and effects] are applied." Warden, Maryland Penitentiary v. Hayden, 387 U. S. 294, 301 (1967). Murray's Lessee's broad statement that the Fourth Amendment "has no reference to civil proceedings for the recovery of debt" arguably only meant that the warrant requirement did not apply, as was suggested in G. M. Leasing Corp. v. United States, 429 U. S. 338, 352 (1977). Whatever its proper reading, we reaffirm today our basic understanding that the protection against unreasonable searches and seizures fully applies in the civil context.
12 This was the view expressed by the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Specht v. Jensen, 832 F. 2d 1516 (1987), remanded on unrelated grounds, 853 F. 2d 805 (1988) (en banc), with which the Seventh Circuit expressly agreed. 942 F. 2d, at 1076.
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